D'Amato: Teachers’ job action déjà vu

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Public school teachers across Ontario are furious at the provincial government, and taking job action. High school teachers already are refusing to fill in for absent colleagues, and on Monday, they’ll also stop extracurricular activities. Meanwhile, elementary teachers are warning of rotating strikes starting Monday, and are voting on whether to hold a day of protest.

Teachers say the Putting Students First Act robs them of their basic rights, and they won’t take it lying down. The law gives government the power to impose cost-cutting collective agreements that would freeze pay, cut sick days and remove perks.

This whole situation gives me flashbacks to another provincewide protest, almost exactly 15 years ago.

Back then, the reins of government were held by hard-right Conservatives under Mike Harris. Teachers shut down schools for two weeks in a wildcat strike. But that didn’t stop passage of the legislation that they hated. Bill l60 took away the power of local school boards to set taxes and it centralized education spending at Queen’s Park.

Both then and now, the teachers originally supported the government they later came to loathe. Teacher unions supported Liberal candidates, and had a warm relationship with Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, until the money stopped flowing. In the mid-1990s, many unionized teachers supported Harris because they were angry with New Democrat leader Bob Rae, who had introduced some mild restraint measures to cope with recession. Teachers thought Harris would be OK because he had pledged to protect classrooms.

Both then and now, teachers and their union leaders used over-the-top language to describe what was happening. Cabinet ministers in 1997 were described as “bullies” and “tyranny” was used to describe the law enacted by a democratically elected Conservative government. These days, the bitterness toward McGuinty in particular is intense. He’s described as a bully and teachers shouted “liar, liar” at a protest in Toronto this summer. One teacher there also likened the situation to, believe it or not, North Korea. (I hope she doesn’t teach history.)

Both then and now, the role of unions was central to the struggle. Back in the 1990s, the unions were upset that school principals were being removed from the union. They also worried that their friendly bargaining relationships with local school boards would be disrupted. If the Harris government was controlling the purse strings, they feared that life would become much tougher. Today, unions warn that their fundamental right to bargain collectively is seriously compromised by the Putting Students First Act

Both then and now, the unions were not nice to dissenters. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has already warned its members of sanctions for those who don’t support job actions — a $500-a-day fine, being publicly named, and suspension of the union’s services. Back in 1997, the few brave souls who kept going to work (it was seen then as an illegal strike) were subject to verbal threats, obscene gestures and social shunning. One local teacher who kept working was so upset, he could neither sleep nor keep food down.

Time has a way of calming everything down. It seemed as if the sky would fall back in 1997, when Bill 160 finally passed. But after a while, it became clear that in some ways that bill made sense. For example, the controversial move to centralize funding at Queen’s Park meant that every child, whether rural or urban, Catholic or public, had an equal amount of money spent on his or her education. Finally, the Catholic and rural kids would get their share. That was a huge improvement.

The Putting Students First Act may be clumsy and heavy-handed, but it is also a long-overdue attempt to keep public-sector compensation in line with the ability of the rest of society to pay. Given the upheavals of the recession, the sluggish recovery and high government deficits, some kind of action is obviously necessary. There will be strike action. Kids will be disappointed in their teachers. The government will order teachers back to work. And we’ll all get over it.